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Sheepshead, Hongroise
Procure a three-pound piece of fresh sheepshead, scale, suppress the bones, neatly trim and make a few light incisions on the skin. Mix on a plate a half ounce butter, with half teaspoon paprika and a teaspoon anchovy paste, briskly rub it into the fish, place on a dish, and let infuse for thirty minutes. Lay it in a frying pan with a half gill white wine and three saltspoons salt. Cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, cook on the fire for five minutes and set in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove, lift up the paper, carefully dress the fish on a dish and keep hot.
Mix in a saucepan a tablespoon butter with one and a half tablespoons flour, stir well, then pour in the fish liquor with a half gill milk and six finely sliced canned mushrooms. Mix a little and let boil for five minutes. Dilute an egg yolk with a half gill cream and add to the sauce. Mix well while heating without boiling for two minutes, pour the sauce and sprinkle a little chopped parsley over the fish and serve.
A straightforward oven-braised fish with a velouté finished with egg yolk and cream. The measurements are the fussy part, and the sauce has one point where it can break.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so a half gill is 4 tablespoons (2 fl oz) — that applies to the wine, the milk and the cream. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, making three saltspoons roughly 3/4 teaspoon salt.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the instruction is simply to set the fish in the oven. A moderate oven, roughly 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent for the twenty minutes. Check the thickest point rather than relying on the clock: general food-safety guidance for fish is 145F, though many cooks pull lean white fish earlier.
- The liaison is the hingeOnce the egg yolk and cream go in, the sauce must not boil or the yolk will curdle into threads. Hold it below a simmer, around 180F, for the two minutes the recipe allows and no longer.
- SheepsheadThe name covers two different fish — the Atlantic sheepshead porgy and the freshwater drum sometimes called sheepshead. Either works, as will any firm white fish that holds together in a piece: black sea bass, drum, snapper or a thick cod loin.
- Suppress the bonesThis means bone the piece out, leaving the skin on. Ask for a skin-on fillet or centre-cut piece already boned; the shallow incisions in the skin keep it from curling as it cooks.
- Anchovy paste and paprikaThe paprika called for would have been sweet Hungarian paprika, not smoked. Anchovy paste is salty in its own right, so taste before adding the full 3/4 teaspoon of salt.
- Buttered paperA cartouche of buttered parchment cut to the pan, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the surface moist without trapping steam the way foil does.
- Canned mushroomsSix sliced canned mushrooms come to about 1/3 cup. Fresh cremini sliced thin work better here; give them a minute in the butter before the flour goes in.
- YieldA three-pound piece as bought, rather less once boned, serves four to six as a main course.
"Hongroise" is French kitchen shorthand for the Hungarian manner, which in the classical repertoire nearly always means paprika, and often onion and cream alongside it — the garnish and sauce names in Escoffier-era cooking worked as a code, so a cook reading "hongroise" knew paprika was coming before reading the ingredient list. Paprika seems to have entered the grand French and American hotel kitchens in the later nineteenth century. Sheepshead is the American contribution: it was a common market fish on the Atlantic coast, and the freshwater fish of the same name was landed in quantity in the Great Lakes, cheap and firm-fleshed, and it turns up in period American cookbooks in dishes a European cook would have built on turbot or sole. The combination suits The International Cook Book, which fits local market fish into imported French formulas.